As medical software becomes more sophisticated and universal, integration among software packages becomes more important and more challenging. For example, electronic medical records (EMR) or electronic health records (EHR) are becoming increasingly common. Clinical trials software, dictation software, research software, radiology information system (RIS) software, Hospital Information System (HIS) software, picture archiving and communication system (PACS) software are other examples of increasingly common medical software.
One of the challenges of the increased use of these different software packages is that they are generally created and supported by different vendors, and do not interoperate or “talk” to each other well. But, when a physician, technician or administrator is dealing with a patient, he/she needs to access all of the information that is pertinent to that patient easily and without having to actively open several different software packages, search for the patient, and then search for the patient's information that is pertinent.
It is particularly important to be able to view, and where necessary, manipulate, images that are associated with a particular patient and/or condition. This is important whether the patient is being treated for a condition, having a regular checkup, or participating in a clinical trial/study.
For example, if a patient is being treated for cancer, his EMR needs to show what medications he is on, what procedures he has had and is scheduled to have, and it also needs to show his progress. The location and size of his cancer, as well as his progress are most likely best depicted in images, whether they are scan images (CT, MRI, Ultrasound etc.) or simple X-ray images or other images, such as lab images or photographs (for example, of skin cancer), etc. It is also likely that the physician for this patient will want to do more than simply view the images. He/she may want to change the settings for the images (for example, the window and/or level settings), zoom, pan, measure, view the images from different angles, view the images in a 3D model, rotate the 3D model, segment the images, perform measurements or anatomy identification on the model/images, etc., to better assess the patient's condition.
Currently this is not practical within any of the EMR or EHR software packages. Some EMR software allows the user to view a static image, such as an X-ray, but the user is not able to manipulate the image, or view a more advanced image such as a 3D image with appropriate interactive tools. Software packages exist for doing this more advanced image processing, but currently they are not integrated with EMR or other medical software platforms. This is not a trivial task since advanced image processing software must handle vast amounts of data and deliver processing power that is well beyond the capacity of most other types of software packages. The same lack of integration exists for clinical trials, and other medical software packages also.
From here on, EMR, EHR, and other medical record software will be referred to collectively as medical record software (MRS). Clinical trial or other trial software will be referred to collectively as clinical trial software (CTS). The term medical record and/or clinical trial software (MRCS) will be used to refer to CTS and/or MRS or other medical software where integration with medical images is desired.
There is a need for seamless integration of MRCS packages with medical images and/or advanced image processing. A user does not want to launch a separate imaging application while using an MRCS software package. The user wants to simply be able to view and manipulate, if necessary, the images associated with that particular patient, while using the MRCS. For example, a cardiologist looking at patient X's EMR wants to see only patient X's cardiovascular images and only the cardiology tools that correspond to them. The cardiologist does not want to have to search through multiple patients, choose patient X, then search through Patient X's images to find the ones that pertain to cardiology, and then weed through multiple irrelevant tools to find the cardiology tools.